A Little Learning

What Douglas Feith knew, and when he knew it.

Douglas J. Feith, who is the UnderSecretary of Defense for Policy, lives in one of the better Maryland suburbs, on a street of large and unhandsome Colonial homes. The interior of Feith’s house has space and light, but it is furnished in a mostly expedient manner; Feith and his wife, Tatiana, have four children—ages eight to twenty-one—and the house feels very much theirs.

The exception is Feith’s library. It is apparent that he has devoted considerable care and money to its design and, in particular, to its collection, which numbers at least five thousand volumes. The floors and shelves are dark oak, and the walls are covered in hunter-green wallpaper. The library is not in the style of the high-station Washington bureaucrat who wants to telegraph his indispensability; there are few photographs of Feith in the company of potentates and prime ministers and presidents. Instead, Feith has filled the room with images of figures who have earned his admiration. Busts of Washington and Lincoln sit on the shelves; Churchill scowls in the direction of Feith’s desk. A black-and-white portrait of Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, hangs over a green leather couch. In his collection, history has displaced nearly every other subject; fiction—his favorite is Nabokov—has been exiled to the basement. The library is weighted disproportionately to the history of the British Empire, and Feith has spent many hours schooling himself in the schemes and follies of the British on the playing fields of the Middle East.

History serves another purpose, Feith suggests: it provides solace to leaders who are misunderstood by their peers. “When history looks back,” he told me, “I want to be in the class of people who did the right thing, the sensible thing, and not necessarily the fashionable thing, the thing that met the aesthetic of the moment.”

Feith, who announced earlier this year that he will be leaving his post by this summer—he said he hopes to write a book about his experiences—has not often met the reigning aesthetic of Washington. It has been Feith’s job, as the top policy adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his departing deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to help build the intellectual framework for the Bush Administration’s campaign against terrorism. His detractors see him as an ideologue who manipulated intelligence to bring about the invasion of Iraq. His main nemesis on Capitol Hill, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who serves on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told me that Feith deceived not only the White House but Congress as well. Yet the criticism of Feith in Washington goes beyond his ideology, to his competence. Even some fellow-neoconservatives, who have been lacerating in their criticism of Rumsfeld for his management of postwar Iraq, have asked whether Feith is better at reading history than at shaping it. “I don’t know whether Feith deserves more praise for supporting George W. Bush’s foreign policy or more criticism for being an agent of Rumsfeld,” William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said.

Fifteen hundred people report to Feith in the Pentagon, where he is known for the profligacy of his policy suggestions. Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, has been much quoted as calling Feith “the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” apparently for ideas he proposed to Franks and his planners.

Franks’s view is not universally shared by the military. Marine General Peter Pace, who has just been nominated to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says of Feith, “Early on, he didn’t realize that the way he presented his positions, the way he was being perceived, put him in a bit of a hole. But he changed his ways.” Apparently, he became more consultative, particularly with his counterparts on the Joint Chiefs. Pace, who calls Feith a “true American patriot,” said he did not understand Franks’s attack. “This is not directed at any individual,” Pace said, “but the less secure an individual is in his thought processes and in his own capacities, the more prone they were to be intimidated by Doug, because he’s so smart.” (A spokesman for Franks, Michael Hayes, said in an e-mail that the General would not comment for this article: “What do you think he has to gain by talking about Feith?”)

Feith’s most prominent defender is Rumsfeld, who told me that Feith is “one of the brightest people you or I will ever come across. He’s diligent, very well read, and insightful.” Rumsfeld explained Feith’s trouble with Franks this way: “If you’re a combatant commander and you’re in the area of operations and you’re hearing from people in Washington, what you’re hearing is frequently not on point to what you’re worrying about at the moment, just as the reverse is also true.”

In conversation, Feith is not often on point. The first time we met, I was prepared to ask about his role in the management of postwar Iraq. Feith, though, preferred to discuss the influence on his thinking of Edmund Burke, the political philosopher who feared instability as much as neoconservatives seem to embrace it. I asked Feith to imagine what Burke would have thought about the Bush Administration’s experiment in Iraq. “Burke warns in his writings about the danger of political abstractions put forward as universal principles,” Feith said. Burke, he continued, “wrote brilliantly and bitterly about the French Revolution and the danger to a society of a bunch of people thinking they could remake society rationally and get rid of all the institutions that have grown up over centuries and reflect the distilled wisdom of numerous people.” But the Bush Administration, Feith added, did nothing of the sort.

To draft Burke into the Bush Cabinet is typical of Feith: counterintuitive and clever, maybe too clever. He rejected the idea that Bush was seeking to remake Iraq in America’s image: “I believe that what makes President Bush’s policy of democracy promotion better, wiser, more careful than what one could describe as starry-eyed Wilsonianism is precisely the recognition that we should not be taking the particulars of our political views and our institutions and trying to impose them in places where there is not fertile soil.” He also said that the idea of “Shiite democracy,” a system in which clerics would play a large role, does not frighten him. “In different parts of the world, clerics play a larger or smaller role in the political process. The idea that there may be a country where clerics play a larger role in the political process than they do in America is not inherently antidemocratic or alarming,” he said. “What the President talks about is that it is the nature of man to want to be free. I don’t think that violates Burke’s warnings.”

Feith says that he is confident of the Administration’s ultimate vindication in Iraq. But he is not indifferent to his current reputation, and during three long interviews and several telephone conversations he was indefatigable in his own defense. “I’m not going to be making some Oprah-like confessions,” he told me at the start.

Feith is fifty-one, but his face is unlined; his hair is partly gray, but thick and moppish. His glasses magnify his eyes, making him appear owlish, and his mouth is set in an expression of bemusement that can slip into impatient condescension when he hears something that he thinks is foolish, which is often. He has the capacity, however, for self-deprecation. He told me that when Franks’s characterization of his brainpower became public he jokingly suggested to his staff that he call a press conference to deny that he was in fact the “fucking stupidest guy” on earth.

Feith’s first job in government came shortly after he graduated from Harvard, as an intern to a subcommittee chaired by Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, whose office was a locus of neoconservative thought. Apart from tours at the National Security Council and the Pentagon during the Reagan Administration (he was a top aide to the neoconservative Richard Perle, who was then an assistant secretary of defense), he has spent his professional life in the private practice of law—he received a law degree from Georgetown University—and as an insistent advocate of neoconservative causes.

One day, Feith showed me around his library. We started at the shelves devoted to Churchill and the lesser occupants of 10 Downing Street in the years before the Second World War. He pulled down a volume about Stanley Baldwin, who served as Britain’s Prime Minister in the mid-nineteen-thirties. “Baldwin was considered the most successful politician of his day,” Feith explained. “But the only people who have heard of him today see him as a jerk”—because, Feith explained, he dithered while Germany re-armed. Like Neville Chamberlain, he said, Baldwin did not understand the nature of the Nazi enemy.

Feith detoured through Disraeli—“He was attacked by many people, the way the neocons get attacked, because he had this fascinating idea that, as he put it, the workingman is a natural conservative”—and then became absorbed in Elie Kedourie’s “In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth.” He looked up long enough to ask, “You’ve read the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1916, haven’t you?”

Kedourie set out to prove, through a close reading of letters between Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, and Sharif Hussein, the leader of the Arab Revolt, that the Arabs led guilt-ridden British officials into granting the Sharif vast territory, including Palestine. But what interested Feith especially is the story, embedded in the episode, of an intelligence failure: “British intelligence was told that there were going to be whole units of the Ottoman military ready to defect if the British would only give support to the Hashemites. Well, the Arab units of the Ottoman military didn’t defect.” Feith smiled. In the Iraq war, it was hoped that the C.I.A. would bring Iraqi Army divisions to the American side, but that did not happen. Feith, like others in Rumsfeld’s circle, is disparaging of the C.I.A.

Feith has been, for decades, a prolific writer of op-eds and articles. In the late nineteen-seventies, he wrote about America’s energy supply, arguing, against conventional wisdom, that oil embargoes could be more damaging to the economies of Arab oil exporters than to the United States. In the nineteen-eighties, as a deputy to Perle, Feith focussed his attention—and skepticism—on arms control and détente. In the early nineteen-nineties, he predicted that the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestinians would fail.

His interests are eclectic, but they are tied together by a single theme: a mistrust of any policy that resembles appeasement—of opec, the Kremlin, Yasir Arafat, or states that sponsor terrorism. He derides the usefulness of treaties struck between democratic and authoritarian states. “If we had mutual trust and real security, you wouldn’t need these agreements,” Feith said, “and if you need these agreements, then it is an illusion to say that you have mutual trust and security.” In the nineteen-eighties, the neoconservatives believed that the Soviet Union could be defeated, not merely contained. “The so-called realist school said that the Soviet Union would never collapse, and that efforts to make it collapse are running the risk of instability,” Feith said. “The Reagan, neocon view was considered lunacy. I pride myself that I was on the right side of that debate. The intellectual class was on the wrong side.” The intellectual class—a synonym, in Feith’s mind, for the liberal élite—misunderstood the Oslo peace process as well, he said, for the same essential reason: the belief that the authoritarian Arafat could be appeased.

Feith formed his views as a teen-ager in the Philadelphia suburbs during the Vietnam War. “I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot,” he told me. “Chamberlain wasn’t popular in my house.” Feith’s father lost his parents, three brothers, and four sisters in German death camps. “What I was hearing from the antiwar movement, with which I had a fair amount of sympathy . . . were thoughts about how the world works, how war is not the answer. I mean, the idea that we could have peace no matter what anybody else in the world does didn’t make sense to me. It’s a solipsism. When I took all these nice-sounding ideas and compared it to my own little personal ‘Cogito, ergo sum,’ which was my understanding that my family got wiped out by Hitler, and that all this stuff about working things out—well, talking to Hitler to resolve the problem didn’t make any sense to me. The kind of people who put bumper stickers on their car that declare that ‘war is not the answer,’ are they making a serious comment? What’s the answer to Pearl Harbor? What’s the answer to the Holocaust?” He continued, “The surprising thing is not that there are so many Jews who are neocons but that there are so many who are not.”

Feith’s library includes a large selection of books on Zionism, but he did not linger there. “I’m not looking to aggravate a distortion about me,” Feith said. The distortion, he said, is that his religion, or at least his longtime support for right-wing Israeli leaders, has affected his policy recommendations to Rumsfeld. Feith dismisses this criticism as a willful misunderstanding of his motives. “My interest in democratization predates the focus on the Middle East,” he says. Rumsfeld, for his part, derides the idea that the Administration was manipulated by its sub-Cabinet-level Jewish officials. “I suppose the implication of that is that the President and the Vice-President and myself and Colin Powell just fell off a turnip truck to take these jobs,” he said.

One afternoon, I asked Feith what had gone wrong in Iraq.

“Your assumption is that everything went wrong,” he replied.

I hadn’t said that, but I spoke of the loss of American lives—more than fifteen hundred soldiers, most of whom died after the declared end of major combat operations. This number, I said, strikes many people as a large and terrible loss.

“Based on what?” Feith asked. “It’s a large sacrifice. It’s a serious loss. It’s an absolute disaster for the families. Nobody can possibly deny how horrible the loss is for the families involved. But this was an operation to prevent the next, as it were, 9/11, the next major attack that could kill tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Americans, and Iraq is a country of twenty-five million people and it was a major enterprise.”

Before the war, the Administration argued that the overthrow of the Baath regime would prevent a marriage of Al Qaeda terrorists to Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons. But after the fall of Saddam the United States and its coalition partners discovered that Saddam had apparently destroyed his stockpiles of unconventional weapons, and the Administration has been unable to prove a close operational relationship between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime.

I asked Feith if he would have recommended the invasion of Iraq if he knew then what he knows now.

“The main rationale was not based on intelligence,” Feith said. “It was known to anyone who read newspapers and knew history. Saddam had used nerve gas, he had invaded his neighbors more than once, he had attacked other neighbors, he was hostile to us, he supported numerous terrorist groups. It’s true that he didn’t have a link that we know of to 9/11. . . . But he did give safe haven to terrorists.”

Feith went on, “Given the ease, as everybody knows, with which one can reconstitute stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons if you have the capabilities which he had, I don’t think the rationale for the war hinged on the existence of stockpiles.” The postmortem reports of C.I.A. weapons inspectors confirm the view that Saddam remained interested in one day reconstituting his weapons-of-mass-destruction programs, Feith said, and went on, “There’s a certain revisionism in people looking back and identifying the main intelligence error”—the assumption of stockpiles—“and then saying that our entire policy was built on that error.” The case against Iraq, he argues today, was only partly about W.M.D.s.

One day, I asked Feith to describe the importance to him of Lincoln. He admires Lincoln, he said, for many reasons, but in particular for the stalwart way that Lincoln confronted evil. When I suggested that Feith might also admire Lincoln because Lincoln shifted the rationale for his war in the middle of the fighting, Feith replied, with enthusiasm, “I never thought of that. That’s right.”

His answer surprised me. I had expected him to say something like “The Bush Administration has not changed the rationale for the war.”

The next morning, Feith telephoned. He had evidently been thinking about his answer, because he had searched out a better one. He found it in an article by Nicholas Lemann, published in this magazineshortly before the beginning of the war, in which Feith was quoted as saying: “When you can think that if we do things right, and if we help the Iraqis, and if the Iraqis show an ability to create a humane representative government for themselves—will that have beneficial spillover effects on the politics of the whole region? The answer, I think, is yes.”

He read this to me and added, “I must say, I’m damn proud of that sentence. That was right on the nose.”

Feith, though, had left out part of what he told Lemann. “Would anybody be thinking about using military power in Iraq in order to do a political experiment in Iraq in the hope that it would have positive political spillover effects throughout the region?” he asked Lemann. “The answer is no.” He continued: “What we would be using military power for, if we have to, would be the goals the President has talked about, particularly the elimination of the chemical and biological weapons, and preventing Iraq from getting nuclear weapons.”

The largest controversy of Feith’s Pentagon career concerned his role in the lead-up to the war. Feith created two new units within his policy shop: the Office of Special Plans and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. Special Plans was the name given to a new subregional office focussed on Iraq. The Ian Fleming-like label was chosen, Feith said, to obscure its mission; at the time, the Bush Administration was publicly pursuing a diplomatic solution to the Iraq crisis, and the Pentagon did not want to advertise that it was engaged in planning for postwar Iraq. The eighteen members of the Special Plans staff prepared strategies on a range of issues that America would face after an invasion: repairing Iraq’s economy and oil industry, the training of a new police force, war-crimes trials, the reorganization of the Iraqi government. The State Department, meanwhile, named its own planning program in a more straightforward way: its Future of Iraq project was also a study of problems anticipated in postwar Iraq. The two programs were not well coördinated; partisans of the State Department have accused the Pentagon of ignoring its planning effort. Feith told me he did not ignore the State Department effort, which he called “a bunch of concept papers.”

The Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was devoted to alternative intelligence analysis; it employed a rotating staff of two people who were asked to read intelligence data provided by the C.I.A. in order to find unexamined connections between state sponsors of terrorism and terrorist groups. Feith said, “I went to these two guys and said, ‘Read the intelligence so you can tell me what I need to know about, so I can develop a strategy and policies for dealing with terror networks.’ ” Most of the work of this unit was soon focussed on looking for evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam. The analysts looked at data from old intelligence reports and concluded that the C.I.A. had overlooked or downplayed evidence of an operational relationship; they prepared a presentation for Feith.

Rumsfeld instructed Feith to offer the briefing to George Tenet, who was then the director of the C.I.A., and Feith’s analysts made the presentation to C.I.A. officials in August of 2002. Several weeks later, the analysts made a more aggressive presentation to White House officials. They included the assertion that the leader of the September 11th hijackers, Mohamed Atta, met with an agent of Iraqi intelligence in Prague shortly before the attacks.

Feith’s Democratic critics accused the counterterrorism group of providing the Administration with incorrect intelligence to buttress its case that Saddam and Al Qaeda were in league. “He was giving the Administration analysis that they wanted to hear,” Senator Levin told me. “It was misleading, it was deceptive, it was based on feeble information.” Feith’s view is that the analysts were simply involved in alternative analysis—an idea that has become increasingly popular as Washington looks for ways to improve its ability to read intelligence.

Although the work of the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group has been a preoccupation for many opponents of the Bush Administration, Feith’s work in Special Plans had far more significance. In his library, I asked Feith what the Office of Special Plans planned. He began by disagreeing with the prevailing wisdom in Washington: that the crises of the past two years—the insurgency, the embitterment of Iraqis toward the United States, the civilian and military casualties—were in many cases preventable. He even disagreed with the notion that they were as serious as many Americans believe them to be.

Feith said, “The common refrain that the postwar has been a disaster is only true if you had completely unrealistic expectations.” The thesis of Administration critics, Feith continued “is that we were a bunch of people intent on going to war with Iraq no matter what. September 11th was a pretext. We believed that it would be easy, that we were linked up to Chalabi”—Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the pro-invasion Iraqi National Congress—“who was arguing that it would be easy and there would not be problems in the aftermath, and so for that reason nobody planned for anything hard, and when it turned out to be hard we were left without a plan.” (Chalabi’s chief sponsor in Washington has been Richard Perle, Feith’s mentor. Chalabi’s group told Senate staff members that it had passed intelligence to one of Feith’s subordinates in Special Plans; the subordinate has denied it.)

Feith went on, “The Marshall Plan didn’t get going until 1948. Here we are less than two years after the liberation of Baghdad, and an enormous amount of reconstruction has been done. If you say to me, ‘Have errors been made in Iraq?,’ I would say yes. Yes, I saw lots of things that I think I would have done—I saw lots of decisions made that I might have done differently. I would say there’s not a single person in the United States government, probably including the President, who would not say the same thing.”

When I asked Feith to describe some incorrect decisions, he said, “A lot of questions of that kind are going to take a little bit of distance and historical perspective to sort out.”

Afghanistan, he said, is an object lesson in the dangers of premature judgment. He pulled out a packet of newspaper articles from late October, 2001, soon after American forces entered Afghanistan, and read from an October 28th column by Maureen Dowd in the Times: “The Northern Alliance was looking ever more feckless, even mocking the American air strikes to a reporter, saying the gazillion-dollar bombs had had no impact on Taliban troops, except to embolden them.” She went on to suggest that a quagmire was in the offing. Feith put down the clippings and asked, “Where does she say, ‘Oops, I guess I got it completely wrong’?”

There’s a difference between Iraq and Afghanistan: it has been more than two years since the invasion of Iraq; Afghanistan was somewhat pacific a year after the overthrow of the Taliban. But Feith would not yield on that point. When I asked, for instance, if the Administration was too enamored of the idea that Iraqis would greet American troops with flowers, he argued that some Iraqis were still too intimidated by the remnants of Saddam’s Baath Party to express their emotions openly. “But,” Feith said, “they had flowers in their minds.”

Feith said that the Pentagon carefully considered the possibility that the invasion and its aftermath could be disastrous. He mentioned what he called the “parade of horribles” memo, drafted by Rumsfeld in October, 2002, which listed all the things that could go wrong in the invasion. “Instead of saying, ‘How can we conceal from the President those things that would make him reluctant?,’ we decided we had to go to him before he makes such an important decision with a list of all those things that could possibly go wrong,” Feith said.

Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser, told me that Feith’s office prepared the White House for the possibility of disaster: “We took seriously, and planned for, with the Department of Defense in the lead, a whole host of very chilling contingencies.”

Feith said that one of those contingencies was the outbreak of looting. I asked him why, then, the military hadn’t seemed more prepared. He replied that he had written a memo on this point, one month before the war, arguing that “ ‘we’re going to have major law-and-order problems after the war.’ ” He went on to say, “We sent it to Central Command. We didn’t send it through the Secretary. It wasn’t a policy—just spotting problems. If you ask me, ‘Did you anticipate problems or did you anticipate a rosy scenario?,’ I’m telling you I wrote a memo anticipating problems.” When I asked Feith if his memo’s message was understood by Franks and his generals at centcom, Feith shook his head and seemed to shrug.

A centcom spokeswoman told me that it would be “inappropriate” to comment on communication between the Pentagon and Tommy Franks. In his autobiography, though, Franks wrote, “Rumsfeld never allowed Feith to interfere in my business. I was always thankful for that.” General Pace said, “It’s unfair to say that Doug was, quote, responsible, because the combatant commander”—Franks—“was responsible for drafting the plan.”

Feith lost other battles as well. One was a plan to train five thousand Iraqi exiles to accompany American troops in the invasion. Feith and Perle, who supported the idea, claimed that centcom subverted the plan. “Central Command saw the training of Iraqis as a pain in the ass,” Perle said. “They take a jaundiced view of the locals.” In the end, only seventy Iraqis were suitably trained before the invasion.

Feith did not argue that a force of Iraqi exiles would be a panacea, but he said that they could have aided in translating, in guiding, and in vetting local officials. He suggested that the problems in postwar Iraq multiplied in part because the good ideas emanating from his policy operation were ignored. “My inclination was to transfer more responsibility to Iraqis early. The strategic thought was liberation, not occupation. When people say, ‘You screwed up the postwar plan,’ what people don’t understand is that we had all kinds of plans. But when Bremer”—Paul Bremer, who was appointed by President Bush to oversee the rebuilding of Iraq—“went over there, he was given autonomy over all kinds of plans that he didn’t implement. The Secretary didn’t want to use the five-thousand-mile screwdriver.”

Several shelves in Feith’s library are taken up by authors whose understanding of the world Feith, I was sure, found lacking. These were books by the great British Arabists, men such as T. E. Lawrence, John Bagot Glubb, and Harry St. John Philby. Neoconservatives, by reputation, have a certain nostalgia for the era of British imperialism, and I asked Feith what he learned from the English Arabists.

“There’s a paradox I’ve never been able to work out,” he said. “It helps to be deeply knowledgeable about an area—to know the people, to know the language, to know the history, the culture, the literature. But it is not a guarantee that you will have the right strategy or policy as a matter of statecraft for dealing with that area. You see, the great experts in certain areas sometimes get it fundamentally wrong.”

I asked Feith if he was talking about himself, and he said, “I am talking about myself in the following sense: expertise is a very good thing, but it is not the same thing as sound judgment regarding strategy and policy. George W. Bush has more insight, because of his knowledge of human beings and his sense of history, about the motive force, the craving for freedom and participation in self-rule, than do many of the language experts and history experts and culture experts.”

History may one day judge the removal of Saddam Hussein as the spark that set off a democratic revolution across the Muslim world. But if Iraq disintegrates historians will deal harshly with the President and his tacticians, the men most directly responsible for taking a noble idea—the defeat of a tyrant and the introduction of liberty—and letting it fail. Feith, like his superiors in the Pentagon and the White House, is not given to public doubt, but in our last conversation he seemed uncharacteristically humble. “When I was in Vienna,” Feith said, “I went to the Ringstrasse, these enormous buildings, most of which were built twenty, twenty-five years before World War One. These buildings were built as the headquarters of a world empire, and they were built for the ages—enormous, imperially scaled buildings. They were built to last. But these people were absolutely on the verge of destruction of their empire, and they didn’t see it. And that was a humbling experience.

“What I don’t believe in, I suppose, is certainty.” ♦

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